Modern-day Culture Wars are Playing Out on Historic Tours of Slaveholding Plantations
by Kelley Fanto Deetz
December 6, 2021
https://theconversation.com/modern-day- ... ons-170617
Introduction:
(The Conversation) Located on nearly 2,000 acres along the banks of the Potomac River, Stratford Hall Plantation is the birthplace of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and the home of four generations of the Lee family, including two signers of the Declaration of Independence, Richard Henry Lee and Francis Lightfoot Lee.
It was also the home of hundreds of enslaved Africans and African Americans. From sunup to sundown, they worked in the fields and in the Great House. Until fairly recently, the stories of these enslaved Africans and of their brothers and sisters toiling at plantations across the Southern U.S. were absent from any discussions during modern-day tours of plantations such as Stratford Hall.
Even now, with new tours and an exhibition highlighting enslaved Africans and African Americans who lived at Stratford Hall, discussions during plantation tours among visitors can often turn into visceral debates over whose history should be told or ignored.
These tensions are part of an ever-growing work of criticism directed at sites that continue to omit the history of the enslaved community. Of the 600 plantations scattered throughout the South, only one, the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, focuses entirely on the experiences of the enslaved.
As a public historian and the director of collections and visitor engagement at Stratford Hall, I can attest that visitors have vastly different expectations when they visit this historic landmark. Their questions reflect their own interpretations, curiosities and political biases, often to the detriment of obtaining a richer education on every aspect of plantation life – the good, the bad and the ugly.
caltrek's comment: When I lived in Virginia a couple of years or so back, I actually visited the Stratford Hall Plantation. I had wanted to visit Jefferson's Monticello. I offered to drive my in-laws to Monticello if they would assist in the navigation. They agreed, but insisted that they would do the driving. When we got in their car, the driver suggested we go to Stratford Hall instead, as it was the closer destination. To avoid an argument, I reluctantly agreed without complaint.
The docent on duty that day (not Ms Deetz) did a pretty good job of showing us around. The cited article brings back memories of that visit. The only complaint I would make about the tour was when the question came up: how did all adopt to the freeing of the slaves?
The docent was completely silent on that issue. Later, I explained to my sister-in-law that the South shifted to a share-cropper system after the Civil War. Later, I learned that many Blacks came to own their own farmland with such ownership peeking in about 1920. Subsequently, that ownership dropped off and then dwindled too almost nothing. A recent article in
The Nation indicates that while Department of Agriculture programs were in theory available to all small farmers in the twentieth century, racist practices of exclusion by Department of Agriculture personnel prevented Blacks from getting their fair share of assistance. So, they lost their land at far greater rate than White farmers. Another example of systemic racism in the history of the United States.
Edit: Since I mentioned
The Nation here is a link to that article (see below). I am not sure, but I hope that you will not encounter a pay wall. (I subscribe to
The Nation)
https://www.thenation.com/article/socie ... ford-debt/
Here are some bottom-line numbers as reported in the article:
Extract:
(The Nation) The government’s reversal on its promise to give millions of newly emancipated Black folks 40 acres and a mule stood in contrast to its land-giveaway policies for white citizens. The Homestead Act of 1862 took some 270 million acres of territory that had been taken from Native Americans—10 percent of all US public lands—and reallocated it in 160-acre parcels to 1.6 million Americans, almost all native or foreign-born whites, the ancestors of roughly 45 million living American adults who continue to reap generational wealth from that land grab. The Southern Homestead Act of 1866 also put free and low-cost public lands into the hands of an overwhelmingly white cohort of owners. Despite being denied these sorts of government handouts, emancipated Black farmers had acquired 3 million acres by 1875, a figure that would rise to 12 million by 1900. Land ownership by Black farmers reached its peak in 1910, when they owned between 15 million and 19 million acres.
Don't mourn, organize.
-Joe Hill